Ken Smith has announced the release of FreeBSD 8.2: "The FreeBSD release engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 and Xen PV support in FreeBSD/i386 improved; ZFS on-disk format updated to version 15; aesni driver for Intel AESNI crypto instruction set; BIND and OpenSSL updates; GNOME updated to 2.32.1; KDE updated to 4.5.5; many miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes." Read the release announcement and release notes for further information; there is also an errata page with a late-breaking news about an OpenSSL issue. Download the installation DVD images for the i386 and amd64 architectures from here: FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso.xz (1,971MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso.xz (2,033MB, SHA256). FreeBSD 7.4, a new update to the project's legacy branch, is also available.

FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system for the i386, amd64, IA-64, arm, MIPS, powerpc, ppc64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's "4.4BSD-Lite" release, with some "4.4BSD-Lite2" enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's "Net/2" to the i386, known as "386BSD", though very little of the 386BSD code remains. FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. FreeBSD comes with over 20,000 packages (pre-compiled software that is bundled for easy installation), covering a wide range of areas: from server software, databases and web servers, to desktop software, games, web browsers and business software - all free and easy to install.

FreeBSD 10.1 has been released: "The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. This is the second release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: the new console driver, vt(4), has been added; support for FreeBSD/i386 guests has been added to bhyve(4); the bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports booting from a zfs(8) file system; support for SMP was added to the armv6 kernels and enabled by default in the configuration files for all platforms that contain multi-core CPUs; initial support for UEFI boot has been added for the FreeBSD/amd64 architecture...." See the release announcement and the release notes for a full list of changes. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso (2,465MB, SHA256, pkglist), FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso (2,261MB, SHA256).

Contrary to expectation, Glen Barber today announced the availability of the fourth release candidate for FreeBSD 10.1: "The fourth RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. This is anticipated to be the final RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE cycle. Some of the changes between 10.1-RC3 and 10.1-RC4 include: fix ATA CF ERASE breakage for certain CF cards; fix a race in pmap_emulate_accessed_dirty() that could trigger a EPT misconfiguration VM-exit. Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC4 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20 GB sparse image." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-RC4-amd64-dvd1.iso (2,463MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-RC4-i386-dvd1.iso (2,260MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the third and final release candidate for FreeBSD 10.1: "The third RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. Some of the changes between 10.1-RC2 and 10.1-RC3 include: several fixes to the UDPLite protocol implementation; the vt(4) driver has been updated to save and restore keyboard mode and LED states when switching windows; several fixes to the SCTP protocol implementation; a potential race condition in obtaining a file pointer has been corrected; fix ZFS ZVOL deadlock and rename issues; restore libopie.so ABI compatibility with 10.0-RELEASE; removed the last vestige of MD5 password hashes; several rc(8) script updates and fixes...." Read the release announcement for further information. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-amd64-dvd1.iso (2,467MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-i386-dvd1.iso (2,299MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the second release candidate for FreeBSD 10.1: "The second RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. Some of the changes between 10.1-RC1 and 10.1-RC2 include: fix XHCI driver for devices which have more than 15 physical root HUB ports; fix old iSCSI initiator to work with new CAM locking; fix page length reported for Block Limits VPD page; add QCOW v1 & v2 support to mkimg(1). Note to consumers of the i386 DVD installer: as result of a package build failure, the X.Org-related ports (including GNOME 2) are not available on the 10.1-RC2 i386 DVD. This will not be an issue for the 10.1-RC3 DVD, nor the 10.1-RELEASE DVD." Continue to the release announcement for more details. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-RC2-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,666MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-RC2-i386-dvd1.iso (1,068MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the first release candidate for FreeBSD 10.1 - with an important note to the users of the ZFS file system: "The first RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. Some of the changes between 10.1-BETA3 and 10.1-RC1 include: a bug that would cause all processes to appear to have the parent PID of '1' has been fixed; various updates to bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8); the Hyper-V KVP (key-value pair) driver has been added, and enabled by default on amd64 and i386 architectures. Important note to ZFS users on the i386 architecture: a regression has been discovered that affects multi-disk (mirror, raidz-1, raidz-2) installations that may cause a kernel panic on boot." Read the full release announcement for further details. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-RC1-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,665MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-RC1-i386-dvd1.iso (1,507MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the third beta of FreeBSD 10.1: "The third beta build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. Changes between 10.1-BETA2 and 10.1-BETA3 include: support for serial and null console has been added to the UEFI boot loader; a potential panic triggered by referencing a device that has been renamed has been fixed in the cam(4) subsystem; OpenPAM has been updated to the Ourouparia (20140912) release; new sysctls have been added to vt(4) to enable or disable potentially dangerous key combinations (such as reboot, halt, and break to debugger); the mkimg(1) utility has been updated to allow creating empty partition entries...." Here is the complete release announcement. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-BETA3-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,666MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-BETA3-i386-dvd1.iso (1,509MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the second beta build of FreeBSD 10.1: "The second beta build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. Changes between 10.1-BETA1 and 10.1-BETA2 include: UEFI-capable memory stick images and CDROM/DVDROM images are now build by default for the 10.1-RELEASE cycle; the gssapi_krb5 library is now included in the gssapi(3) build; the default motd(5) text has been changed to clarify the included information and including references to additional resources; a potential crash in ctld(8) has been fixed when a getaddrinfo(3) call fails; fix Denial of Service in TCP packet processing; support for Promise TX8660 8-port 3Gbps HBA has been added...." Continue to the release announcement for a detailed list of changes and other information. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-BETA2-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,666MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-BETA2-i386-dvd1.iso (1,509MB, SHA256).

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the initial beta release of FreeBSD 10.1: "The first beta build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. A list of changes since 10.0-RELEASE are available on the stable/10 release notes page. Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-BETA1 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20 GB sparse image. Note to consumers of the dvd1.iso image: the packages included on the DVD do not have a corresponding pkg(8) repository due to an incompatibility with pkg-1.2.x and pkg-1.3.x. This will be fixed for BETA2." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details. Download: FreeBSD-10.1-BETA1-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,665MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-10.1-BETA1-i386-dvd1.iso (1,508MB, SHA256).

FreeBSD 9.3, the latest update to the project's legacy branch, has been released: "The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: the zfs(8) filesystem has been updated to support the bookmarks feature; the uname(1) utility has been updated to include the -U and -K flags, which print the FreeBSD_version for the running userland and kernel, respectively; the fetch(3) library has been updated to support SNI, allowing to use virtual hosts on HTTPS; several updates to gcc(1) have been imported from Google." See the release announcement and release notes for further information. Download: FreeBSD-9.3-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso (1,718MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-9.3-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso (1,581MB, SHA256).